Scientists Develop Computer That Can 'Translate' a Dog's Bark

Computers may be better at telling the difference between dog barks than humans, according to a new study by Hungarian researchers.

In a series of tests, researcher Csaba Molnár, from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, and his team found that a computer was able to differentiate the acoustic features of barks and classify them according to different contexts and individual dogs.

More than 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheep dogs in six different situations were analyzed by the computer. The barks were tape recorded and then digitized on a computer, which used software to study their differences.

The dogs were tested under stranger, fight, walk, alone, ball and play scenarios, which the computer correctly classified 43 per cent of the time. That wasn't the best success ratio, but it was far better than human recognition, the researchers said.